It's the end of the line for Apple's line of servers, the Xserve. The Cupertino giant has just announced that the Xserve line (no more future models, either) will no longer be sold after January 31, 2011, and advises people interested in Mac OS X Server to buy either a Mac Mini or a Mac Pro with Snow Leopard Server installed.

My problem with Apple doing away with the Xserve is that a Mac Pro won't fit in a damn rack, and while Linux is great for most things, it won't do AFS very well, and the underlying ext3 file system won't support the same naming schemes as hfs+. I can name a file "apple file 11/7/2010" no problem, but that breaks any form of Linux file system. Also, hfs+ stores a more detailed meta data file that ext3 that many programs count upon. So once you can no longer get an Xserve with a fiberchanel card, and you try to switch to xnix, all of your existing file names will be invalid. (this is all from experience!!)